America's housing crisis has reshaped cities in profound ways. As rents have skyrocketed and affordable neighborhoods have become harder to find, higher-income residents have increasingly begun moving into historically lower-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods. This process, gentrification, has generated enormous debate about displacement, neighborhood change, and racial dynamics. But one question has received surprisingly little attention: how does gentrification affect the way Black residents feel about the racial groups moving into their neighborhoods?

Cities that reclaim their water services from private operators tend to invite citizens into governance during the dramatic transition, then quietly push them out once serious decisions begin. This is the central finding of our comparative study of Paris and Naples, published in Urban Affairs Review: public ownership is not sufficient for public accountability, and participatory governance structures created to legitimize reform are routinely dismantled or emptied of meaning the moment civic actors start pressing on questions of budgets, hiring, and investment priorities. In other words, participation is welcomed at the margins, but becomes contested once it reaches decisions about how resources are actually allocated.

Contrary to other countries such as Denmark, in the Netherlands local party systems shows signs of reverse nationalisation. Using data from seven municipal elections between 1998 and 2022, we observe that the Dutch local party system nationalisation index decreases considerably over time, meaning more independent local parties in the local council. We find that size, rurality, peripherality and mergers all have an influence on the index.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, over 1.5 million people fled to Poland in a matter of weeks. Poland had no national integration strategy, no refugee camps, and very little experience managing large-scale displacement. Cities, rather than the central government, became the frontline responders and improvised solutions for housing, healthcare, education, and social support with minimal guidance from above.

Urban sprawl has been a dominant feature of U.S. urban expansion over the past five decades. Sprawl has many well-documented negative consequences, such as the degradation of prime agricultural land, higher per-unit costs of land development and urbanized land and housing, higher municipal costs to maintain services and amenities, longer and more frequent travel distances in single-occupancy vehicles, and even poor health. Unsurprisingly then, many U.S. cities, regions, and states have tried to combat urban sprawl since the 1960s using four main approaches: state growth management laws, urban service area boundaries, local government regulations, and smart growth strategies.

Since its introduction in the 1990s, researchers across disciplines painstakingly analyzed HOPE VI, a public-private redevelopment initiative that transformed over 100 thousand units public housing across the United States while also displacing an estimated 250,000 residents. Despite it being adopted for the last fifteen years and being poised to convert four times as much public housing as HOPE VI, much less attention has been given to outcomes of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD program.

Homeownership has long been one of the primary ways families build wealth in the United States. But when families become homeowners through inheritance, the legal rules governing inherited property can introduce new challenges that threaten housing stability and wealth preservation.

In this brief introductory essay I focus on articles on urban crisis published in the first two decades of UAR, leading up to the 1985 symposium, “Whatever Happened to the Urban Crisis?”, which included an introductory essay by Mark Gottdiener (1985) and three articles, by Eric Monkkonen (1985), Alexander Ganz (1985), and Irene Rubin (1985). I then provide a quick and admittedly incomplete overview of changing notions of urban crisis since that symposium to suggest that, despite healthy usage of the term in the decades that followed and the invention of new terms such as “permacrisis” and “crisis cities” that suggest some evolution in this particular framework, the framework itself has always been so malleable and potentially inclusive that its subject is not crises per se but rather how and why we might define things as crises.

Across Europe, women are steadily increasing their presence in local councils, yet they are still far less likely to become mayors. Our research suggests that the way mayors are elected plays an important role in shaping this legislative-executive gender gap. We conducted the cross-sectional time-series analysis using the original dataset describing women’s descriptive representation among local councils and local executives in 33 European countries. We found that countries where mayors are directly elected by citizens tend to have fewer women mayors compared to countries where councillors elect the mayor or the executive committee.

Local officials face a stubborn challenge: public-safety gains can be fragile when budgets and political attention shift from year to year. Our new Urban Affairs Review study examines a practical governance tool that Texas communities have used to stabilize crime-control funding: Crime Control and Prevention Districts (CCPDs). The central takeaway is simple: cities that adopt CCPDs tend to see meaningful reductions in crime for several years.

When Congress created Opportunity Zones in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the promise was compelling: use tax incentives to redirect private capital into distressed communities that had been overlooked by investors. Seven years later, with the program recently made permanent by Congress in 2025, a crucial question remains: is it actually working? New research analyzing over 70,000 property transactions across the United States reveals that Opportunity Zones are delivering measurable impacts on real estate markets—with important nuances about where and how the policy succeeds.

In many city elections across the United States, voters face a similar challenge: they are asked to choose among candidates they know very little about. Ballots often list only names, not party labels, and local races receive little media attention. In these low-information settings, voters look for clues that can serve as “shortcuts,” or anything that will help them quickly decide which candidate to vote for.

As local leaders grapple with soaring housing costs, persistent inflation, and a tight labor market, living wage ordinances offer a targeted way to support low-income workers without waiting for federal action. With the federal minimum wage remaining at $7.25 since 2009, cities and towns have stepped up, but adoption remains spotty. A recent research note highlights that only 14% of the largest U.S. municipalities have enacted such policies, yet they could play a bigger role in reducing poverty and boosting local economies.

Farmers’ markets offer valuable resources not only to the people who shop at them, but also to the broader communities in which they are situated. They are an important source of fresh and sustainable produce, often surpassing the quality of food available at traditional grocery stores, and they frequently operate as gathering places that facilitate social interaction and cohesion.

This raises a basic and surprisingly underexplored question: Which neighborhoods actually have farmers’ markets, and why?

Recently, there has been renewed interest in engaging citizens locally. While political motivations vary, a common goal is to enhance participation and representation by creating formal bodies of community representatives to play an advisory role in policy processes. While these intentions are laudable, the best-intentioned reform can flounder if not designed properly. Yet there has been little attention to design, and in particular, to overcoming the challenges that confront the implementation of most participatory designs. This study contributes to this participation literature by illuminating how to design for more effective implementation.

Municipal amalgamation, the process of merging smaller administrative units into larger ones, has been a key policy tool globally to address issues like fiscal pressure, governance challenges, and urbanization. But do these mergers deliver the promised benefits? Our recent research provides a comprehensive review of the effects of municipal amalgamations, highlighting key findings that are essential for policymakers and citizens alike.

Vacant homes are often treated as a technical concern for urban planners or housing officials. They are discussed in terms of land use, neighborhood maintenance, or redevelopment strategies. Yet in many places, empty homes are also a visible sign of deeper change. They tend to appear where people are leaving, where local services shrink, and where the future of a community feels uncertain. In South Korea, this pattern has become increasingly pronounced. While much public attention focuses on high housing prices and speculation in major cities, a different housing reality is unfolding elsewhere, marked by rising vacancy in smaller cities and rural districts.

Across U.S. cities, homeless encampments are being cleared at an accelerating pace. These “sweeps,” “cleanups,” or “abatements” are typically justified in the name of public health, safety, or order. The harm to people living in encampments is increasingly well documented. What is far less visible is another consequence: the emotional toll these displacements take on the people who are tasked with carrying them out.

Our study presents a new approach to measuring U.S. gentrification at the census tract level. We utilize a popular public data set – the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Loan Application Register – and leverage it in an unconventional way. The premise of our study is that there is valuable information about household income levels contained within this mortgage banking dataset. More specifically, the mortgage application data can provide a window into the income levels of households who are seeking to move into a neighborhood. We develop several new measures that benchmark the income of mortgage applicants against existing homeowners in a neighborhood. In our study we show statistically significant relationships between these measures and more traditional gentrification over the 2010 to 2017 period. Furthermore, instead of using a binary measure of gentrification, our tool allows one to gauge the breadth and intensity of the gentrification forces occurring from homebuyer demand in a given tract.

Over the past few years, the architecture of new apartment buildings has received significant attention. In particular, a style of new building sometimes called “fast-casual” or “gentrification architecture.” Many readers may recognize these buildings: blocky, generally black-and-white (although some come with neon pops of color), and unornamented. They’ve inspired countless debates, with critics calling them ugly and bland, or more creatively “Lego structures” and “oversized tin cans.” 

Across Europe and beyond, cities are reimagining abandoned military sites as vibrant cultural spaces. But what happens when the very institutions that support these transformations begin to commodify them? Our paper explores this tension by comparing two distinct governance models for culture-led regeneration of former military barracks, Metelkova in Ljubljana and Kasárna Karlín in Prague, which have both significantly enriched their neighborhoods through creative placemaking, demonstrating how culture can transform abandoned urban spaces into vibrant spaces.

Minimum parking requirements—zoning regulations that require a certain number of parking spaces to be built with new developments—come with a long list of downsides. The requirements increase the costs of development, reduce housing densities, subsidize car ownership, and reduce walkability. They also make it difficult to adapt and reuse historic buildings. In response, cities as diverse as Anchorage, Buffalo, and San Diego have reduced or eliminated parking requirements in recent years. 

There is a long history of municipal governments worldwide passing resolutions, laws, and regulations governing discrimination and anti-discrimination. These cities are increasingly stylized as “human rights cities,” where municipal governments seek to protect civil rights of their residents: examples include sanctuary city movements, passing municipal versions of international law, and instituting laws to protect LGBTIQ citizens. In short, cities have emerged as a critical space for civil society to protect human rights, which is especially important given the increasing prevalence of repressive laws targeting minority groups in many authoritarian and backsliding countries.

Coalitions amongst people of color are essential for building political power—particularly as resources and influence fall along lines of race and ethnicity. In “Fundamentals of Solidarity: Race Based Caucus Organizing in Houston,” I consider how Black organizers-built solidarity with each other and with the staff of Houston in Action (HiA).

Transit-oriented development (TOD) represents a promising form of development in urban transit corridors offering walkable communities, reduced car dependence, and enhanced access to opportunities. But all too often, the benefits of new transit investments are overshadowed by rising housing costs and the displacement of long-time residents and small businesses.

Public participation is widely regarded as a cornerstone of democratic urban governance. Around the world, governments and planners have embraced participatory practices to involve residents in decisions that shape their cities. Yet much of the academic and policy discourse continues to frame participation as a state-led process, where the public is invited by government actors to engage in predetermined formats designed to improve plans, policies, and projects.

What if restoring polluted streams behind public housing complexes could directly fund new affordable housing? This innovative approach, explored in our recent Urban Affairs Review article, introduces public housing authorities (PHAs) to a unique opportunity to generate additional revenue by participating in federal "compensatory mitigation" markets. Through our study of the Durham Housing Authority (DHA) in North Carolina, we demonstrate pathways through which urban stream and wetland restoration can be financially viable, environmentally beneficial, and socially impactful.

This article seeks to understand whether features of neighborhoods influence how knowledgeable individuals are about local politics. Whether we are interested in traits of urban neighborhoods or describing the entire range of communities along the urban-rural spectrum, many features of communities have been used to distinguish between neighborhoods and communities.

Police officers serve a public service role, as highlighted by scholarly literature on street-level bureaucracy. Thus, it matters whether police departments represent the social characteristics of communities. In socially diverse cities, police diversity promises to facilitate police–community interactions. However, to what extent are US police departments diversifying their personnel?

Are Canadian municipal politics simply about fixing potholes and managing traffic, or does ideology shape municipal behavior more deeply? In contrast to the U.S. and several other federations, Canadian municipal elections are overwhelmingly non-partisan. Fewer than one in five municipal officials run on party slates. This fact leads many to infer that Canadian city halls are free from the left-right ideological divide that exists at higher levels of government.